Farming in the Magical World

Is this considered a religious origin?

Or is it a form of primitive totem worship?

What's even stranger is why they can so confidently say that humans evolved from monkeys?

It's important to understand that even in another world, the theory of evolution was only derived by Darwin through observation and summarization, very close to the modern era.

"You heard about this in the capital?" Melissa looked at Lanny with a half-smile.

Having lived in the castle for a while, she had learned quite a bit about Lanny's past achievements in the capital, and assumed he had heard about them from one of his lovers.

Although he was completely baffled as to why she had that expression, he quickly nodded in agreement since she had given a seemingly reasonable explanation.

Seeing his shamelessness, Melissa was helpless. "Fine, how do you plan to use this? Are you going to just print it into a book and show it to the people?"

“Of course not,” Lanny shook his head, but then he looked at the two of them intently. “Do you think anyone would be interested if those stories I showed you before were published as books and sold?”

"You talk such lofty things, but in the end, you still have to make money." Melissa rolled her eyes again upon hearing this, finally understanding this guy's money-grubbing nature.

Tiffany's reaction was different from Melissa's. She frowned and thought for a moment before slowly expressing her thoughts.

"Noble ladies are usually quite free, so some people might be interested, but as for the nobles themselves, I'm afraid..."

To be honest, the noblewomen of today may seem to have a high status, but they don't have much to do and are actually quite bored. Apart from drinking tea and managing household affairs, they have almost nothing to do.

If they lived in a city, like Elfen, they could at least organize dances and dinners. But if they lived in a remote, impoverished place like Castel Ridge, it was a different story. There weren't many people around for miles to have an equal conversation with, let alone a dance.

The lives of the nobles, however, were much more exciting.

Chatting with friends, hunting, going out for drinks—if you're really bored, even teasing the maid can make life more colorful.

Of course, this refers to the nobles themselves, not their family members. And the kingdom has never heard of female nobles; naturally, all nobles are male.

Therefore, she believed that this item would be quite attractive to women, but the nobles would certainly not be interested.

It all comes down to how much this thing is priced; if it's too high, it definitely won't work.

"Regarding the price..." Lanny thought for a moment, then turned to Melissa and asked, "Raw materials or bark? And how do we solve the problem of it crumbling?"

"Hmm," Melissa nodded first, confirming the question about using tree bark as the main material, and then continued to explain, "The reason it was crumbling before was actually due to some problems in the production process, which caused the fibers you mentioned to be processed too finely. I slightly modified the production process and it was fine!"

Perhaps due to the influence of magical elements on the plants in this world, the trees and plants here have generally grown much taller. In terms of papermaking, even ordinary tree bark has fibers with sufficient length and toughness to meet the needs of papermaking, which greatly reduces the difficulty of collecting materials for the castle!

In that case, the material cost will be very low. The only difference is the labor cost during production, so Lanny doesn't plan to set the price too high.

His idea was one copper coin per sheet. Although this price wasn't exactly cheap, it was still a significant advantage for parchment—animal hide paper.

Lowering prices further is not out of the question, but he is worried that it would have too much of an impact on traditional industries, which could lead to many problems. As for the future, it is not impossible to continue to lower prices once the industry has gained sufficient strength.

"By the way, what are the prices of books in the Bauhinia Kingdom?" Lanny asked Melissa casually.

He certainly wouldn't dare ask about the price in the Kingdom of Andrew, otherwise others would wonder how he could not know these things after living in the capital for more than half a year.

If you ask about the Bauhinia Kingdom, then there's no problem with that. He's never been to the Bauhinia Kingdom, and as the most prosperous and powerful kingdom on the continent, its prices are quite relevant, right?

Sure enough, Melissa had no doubts at all. Instead, she carefully recalled the details before slowly introducing the books: "Ordinary books range from a few gold coins to more than ten gold coins!"

"If it's a more exquisitely made book, with illustrations inside and iron ramming corners, it would cost hundreds of gold coins. Of course, these books are usually very important items, which is why they are made so exquisitely. The contents inside are much more valuable than the books themselves!"

"As for books that record magic and formations, there's no upper limit to their price!"

While she was still in the capital of the Bauhinia Kingdom, she attended an internal gathering of magicians. One of them brought out an ancient magic book, intending to sell it at the gathering to alleviate her immediate financial crisis.

The book had an unusually antique appearance, with its gleaming gold corner protectors worn down. There wasn't even a name on the front. Inside, it only recorded the insights and experiences of an unknown magician, along with some basic spell practice methods and methods for setting up arrays, including the "Pentagram Array" she had heard about before.

These spells were so ancient, probably hundreds of years old, that they didn't hold much appeal for her. She was only somewhat interested in a few ancient formations recorded on them.

For a magic book that isn't particularly valuable, the seller asked for five thousand gold coins and wouldn't accept any bargaining. This gives you an idea of ​​what the market price for magic books really is.

When mages teach their apprentices, as long as the apprentices sense magical elements, in addition to teaching them the most basic Condensation Technique to help the mage absorb magical elements during meditation, they will almost always teach them a few basic spells.

Basic spells like Fireball, Cleanse, and Illuminate are examples. As for more advanced spells, well, I'm sorry, if you're lucky, you can learn some from a mentor, but if you're unlucky, you can only buy them from other mages.

As for the price, none of them are below a thousand; otherwise, how could we say that magicians are expensive?

If you really don't have the money, there are ways to exchange rare magical materials with other magicians.

She traded a phoenix egg for it, and a phoenix egg, especially one with mutated blue markings, is worth around five thousand on the market.

After Melissa's explanation, Lanny found it to be of little reference value and offered almost no help in setting prices.

As for why the books are so expensive, he could understand.

Printing technology was not advanced in this world. Books were almost all handwritten. A book could easily have several hundred pages, and it would take one person several months to copy it. In addition, not many people were literate, so how could it not be expensive?

It's not entirely accurate to say that printing technology didn't exist in the world. At least the kingdom's history he discovered in the castle's study was printed, not copied.

However, it is said that the cost of printing such books is not low. He did not know the specifics of how it was done, but he had asked Frank about this issue before.

According to him, there are some people in the kingdom's royal family who can do this kind of mass printing, but they never offer it to the public.

Ultimately, he did not set a price immediately, but instead made arrangements for paper production first.

He designated a section of the new factory area by the river specifically for papermaking workshops.

Speaking of which, the new factory was completed a couple of days ago, and the blacksmith's workshop and carpentry workshop have already moved there. For the time being, the castle no longer hears the clanging of blacksmithing, and the people in the castle finally have some peace and quiet, no longer having to endure the clanging of blacksmithing every day.

Inside the new factory, the blacksmith workshop was renamed Workshop No. 1, the carpentry workshop was renamed Workshop No. 2, and the glass workshop was renamed Workshop No. 3.

Now, the castle has a fourth workshop—a papermaking workshop.

He still left the arrangements for the workshop to Cody. Now Cody handles almost all the big and small affairs of the workshop, which saves him a lot of trouble.

As for the production process, he left it to Melissa, asking her to discuss with Cody what tools were needed, and that Hammer and Jimmy would help her with that.

As for him, the esteemed Baron, he naturally had more important things to do, which was to polish the few short stories he had written earlier.

Although he had thought about making some money from this, after practicing for a while, he felt that his writing skills had improved and naturally needed to be polished again.

However, after several days of polishing and refining, he found that making a book out of it seemed somewhat thin.

The ones he had compiled before were the most well-known fairy tales that he remembered clearly, such as "Snow White," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Cinderella," which were mostly short stories.

As for long novels, there are some. "The Sword of the Brave" is a hodgepodge that borrows from the Prince's Revenge and mixes in all sorts of old tropes. Under Melissa's pressure, it has been expanded quite a bit and could be made into a standalone book. But what about the others?

He does remember quite a few fantasy stories by name, including the famous Harry Potter, the well-known Lord of the Rings, and the magical Alice in Wonderland.

However, all he could remember were the names; the plot was so fragmented and disjointed that it was impossible to write it down.

He felt that if he honed his writing skills for a few more years and pieced together the plots from his memory, he might be able to produce a few plausible but ultimately flawed works. But right now, it was simply not an option.

Moreover, there are some things that really can't be written down right now; if he did, he would probably have to spend a lot of time explaining them.

Take Alice in Wonderland, for example. I won't go into other examples, but how do you explain the mirror?

There are mirrors now, there's one in his bedroom, Tiffany usually uses it to do her hair and makeup, but the effect is really bad, you can only vaguely see a person's general appearance.

The mirror is primarily made of a beautifully crafted wooden frame, combined with an inlaid, highly polished silver plate.

Not only is the effect poor, but because the silver plate is too soft and too easily deformed, it looks more like a funhouse mirror.

This was one of the dowry items that the Earl sent when Tiffany married into the family.

Although Angus didn't like Tiffany, and even hated her, he was, after all, an earl and still had to save face. His dowry wasn't lavish, but it included almost everything a count's daughter should have, and this mirror was one of them.

The glass still has a strong green tint, so it's impossible to make a mirror from it.

As for the method of making transparent glass, he completely left it to Cody to try, but there's been no news yet, and it seems that progress isn't going well.

He thought that once he improved his writing skills, Cody might be able to master the production of transparent glass.

Then we can try making mirrors, and the story of Alice in Wonderland can also be made into a separate short story and sold.

Therefore, what he ultimately compiled were seven short stories and a book titled "The Sword of the Hero."

He was too lazy to think of a name, so he simply named it "Castle Stories Collection," with the short stories as the first volume and the other long story as the second volume.